/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

package org.odata4j.repack.org.apache.commons.codec;

/**
 * <p>
 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders. This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}. Every implementation of Encoder provides this common generic interface whic allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec package.
 * </p>
 * 
 * @author Apache Software Foundation
 * @version $Id: Encoder.java 634915 2008-03-08 09:30:25Z bayard $
 */
public interface Encoder {

  /**
   * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code> or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
   * 
   * @param pObject
   *            An object ot encode
   * 
   * @return An "encoded" Object
   * 
   * @throws EncoderException
   *             an encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a failure condition during the encoding process.
   */
  Object encode(Object pObject) throws EncoderException;
}
